


Caught in the Grey

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Headcanon, Heavy Angst, M/M, Post-Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-11 19:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10472664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: The hardest battles aren't fought on the war-front. They're fought in a mother's heart.





	1. lost the war

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/157745547127/in-re-to-that-nyxs-mom-post-please-imagine-noct) for an anonymous request.

“No.”

She’d asked him if he was okay because what else could she say to the silent, crestfallen son that appeared at her doorstep, looking like he was lost rather than right at home. He was quicker to give her an answer than he usually did.

She didn’t need to ask anything else. She’d known the second the skies cleared and the light had streamed in through her window. Galahdians were an old people. They knew the ancient stories, were all too familiar with the prophecies of the Six, passing them down from generation to generation.

Besides that, she knew just by the broken stare that looked right through her at absolutely nothing. She knew by the absent space at her son’s side where the Prince of Lucis had once resided as if it were his true throne.

She tugged Nyx into the house and set him down on a kitchen chair, her chest hollowing at how easily he was lead and how heavily he sat down. As if every bone in his body weighed a thousand pounds, and the very air he breathed was as heavy as stone.

Her first instinct was to wander to the stove-top. Tea. Tea could fix everything. She had a _ton_ of tea. Green tea, black tea, herbal tea… Chamomile for stress, peppermint for pain… but not that kind of pain. No, that kind of pain was the one thing tea couldn’t fix. There was only one drink in the world that could accompany that kind of hurt.

She grabbed two glasses and pulled the bottle of traditional Galahdian whiskey from the top of the fridge. She filled each glass to the brim and nudged one over to Nyx, helping his hand around it before raising her own and tapping the edge of his glass.

“To the King.”

She knocked back hers and he gulped down his, and that was all it took to get him to break.

They’d both thought he had run out of tears since Selena. She remembered him crying the day she was pronounced dead being the day he’d cried more than he ever had in all his life. More than when she’d first held him in her arms as a baby and he wailed for hours and it only made her smile because she knew then just how strong he was going to be. He hadn’t cried again after that. And she knew that the only other tears she had left in her after the day of her daughter’s death would only ever be for her son.

She held the worst of them back as she wrapped her arms around him and let him sob into her shoulder. This was her son, her baby, and he had far too many tears to shed to be crowded with her own. So, she gulped down how much it hurt to feel the deep, shuddering jolts of grief pound through his chest. She resigned herself to hushing everything he said, dragging her palm in long circles into his back.

“I did it again,” he cried. “I failed, I didn’t protect him, what the fuck is the point if I can’t protect them?”

He cried over Selena, as if he’d lost her all over again. The defining death that had steered him onto the Kingsglaive’s road and molded him into the knight that had made her so proud. He cried about his friends in the glaive, the ones that had died and the ones that had turned on him. He cried about Regis, the closest idea of a father he’d ever had, telling himself that none of this would have happened if he’d been better in Insomnia.

And he cried over Noctis, at last. His final failure. The man that had crept in and coaxed out the one half of Nyx’s heart that he’d kept a secret. Even from his own mother. Happiness had been the only thing she’d ever wanted for him, and the only thing he wasn’t really looking for. But it found him, whether he wanted it to or not, and then it left.

All the light had been returned to the world and it cast the darkest shadows deep into Nyx. She resented it for that. Knew it wasn’t fair to. But nothing was fair when it was her son that had to pay the price. That’s how it worked. Moms hated the thing that hurt their kid.

She couldn’t make this thing go away though. She would have to wake up to the light stinging her eyes and know that it hurt Nyx’s far more. All she could do was just be there. All she could do was just keep surviving. Like she’d survived his father, survived Selena, and survived ten years of darkness. She would survive her son’s broken heart and spend the rest of her days putting it back together for him.

She poured them another round.


	2. inverse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noctis visits Galahd, but not in the way he wanted to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/158914752172/whoops-this-is-that-nyx-goes-back-to-his-mom-and) for an anonymous request.

“Detour,” was all Noctis said in response to the confused questions coming from the passenger seats.

Wrestling the wheel from Ignis had been the first in a long series of trials Noctis still wasn’t sure he was ready to undertake. He didn’t think he was ever going to be ready.

Steering onto the eastern roads had been an even harder task. The car had drummed idly at the cross-section well after the light had changed. It took a gentle prod from Prompto – “Know where you’re going, buddy?” – before he turned the wheel. The ride was apprehensive after that, foreign terrain crawling past. Leide’s yellow grasses died the further they drove, swept beneath rosy sands and prickly brown brush. A dark green river glistened ahead, coursing beneath a long bridge out of the territory.

Noctis had been certain that they would meet resistance – and he could see in Iggy’s and Gladio’s expressions in the rearview that they were expecting it, too. East of Insomnia was conquered territory. Little else but skeleton towns and barren earth. The Empire had abandoned the land once they took Insomnia, it seemed. There was a single barricade at the end of the bridge, but no living guards left to uphold it.

Broken MT limbs were strewn across the over-pass like a necklace of teeth boasting a hunter’s kills. A dangerous statement to make against the Empire’s occupation, but little else was more dangerous than Galahd’s fury. Prompto stared up in awe as they passed beneath and snapped a photo.

Building’s filled out after the barricade. There were still a few burnt out husks on the outskirts, but the further they drove saw them homes, newly built and occupied. People started appearing along the dusty roads. Weathered faces regarded the slick city car with suspicion rather than the awe it had attracted further west. Prompto slid down in his seat a little more after each local they passed, muttering something about putting the hood up to protect them from the glares.

Noctis drove them through town, cutting straight through to the furthest end of it. Trees grew a little more densely there, shading the sun-baked earth and the ramshackle house at the end of the street. Noctis stared at the little cottage for a long time before parking the car and getting out. He pressed the keys into Ignis’s hand as his friend exited the vehicle behind him, catching him mid-way out of his seat.

“Find a motel, get something to eat,” Noctis ordered, gently. “I’m going to be a while.”

“With what exactly?”

It was Gladio that asked, lifting a brow from behind Ignis, who glanced between Noctis’s face and the keys in his hand with an unreadable expression.

It was quiet, the motor of the car humming impatiently around them. Noctis was fixed beneath three separate stares, all asking the same thing. And he still didn’t know how to answer.

“I just… have to do something,” he said, pathetically. “And I have to do it on my own. Please?”

He didn’t want to order them away. He didn’t want to be the Crown Prince today. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to be Noctis today either, really. He didn’t want to be doing any of this. He didn’t want to be here, not like this. This wasn’t the way he’d dreamed of returning to Galahd.

His attention snapped back up to his friends. Ignis moved wordlessly to take his place in the driver’s seat, the door shutting mutely behind him. His hands hovered over the steering wheel for a moment before he turned to Noctis.

“Whatever you need to do here, I’m sure it’s not going to be easy. Not even after it’s finished. We’ll be here for you when it’s over, Noct.”

“Did that not go without saying?” Gladiolus snorted, crossing his arms and turning the back of his head to Noctis. A mechanism to hide his heart from showing in his hard eyes.

“Whatever you need, buddy,” Prompto said. “Text when you’re ready to come home, okay?”

Noctis swallowed the metallic-tasting ball in his throat. There was no home, he wanted to cry at him. Home died in the city he’d lived in. Home was a man that none of them had ever met. And he wasn’t coming for Noctis.

He buried the tears as he followed the little cobblestone path, fighting back weeds on either side, up to the front door. He forced himself to be brave as he raised his fist to the door. But his courage failed him in the end. He’d made the right turns on the roads, he’d passed the right buildings, he’d made the final steps… but he couldn’t fucking _knock._

The Regalia’s engine revved as his friends started to pull away, and Noctis didn’t need to knock. The door flew open, her eyes wild and hopeful as they landed on the taillights crawling away. She didn’t look at him at first. Instead counting the heads in the car. Recognizing none of them. She stared after the Regalia well after it was a dot at the end of the road, the light in her eyes dying a little more with every turn of the wheels.

“Not with you, then,” she murmured, looking at an empty space just above Noctis’s shoulder.

“And not with you.”

The words came out in a choke. Affirming what he already knew. That his scarcest hope would be unfulfilled. That the dream which had encouraged him to make the drive was only that. A dream.

Nyx wasn’t here.

Nyx wasn’t anywhere.

They stood in silence for a while. Grief strangling the both of them. They had been relying on the other to be safeguarding the man they both loved. And he wasn’t with either of them.

“You know,” she said, voice as thin and crumpling as paper. “Since the first day he enlisted, every time the phone rang I was afraid it was going to be that call. The one that every soldier’s mother fears. Ten years and that never changed. Every single ring. Telemarketers, electrical company, bank… Even the ones from him. A heart attack just before I picked it up. It was like the gunshot I was sure was going to kill him one day… You know what I heard the day the city burned?”

The same thing Noctis heard. The horrible space at the other end of his phone. The absence of funny texts, dirty texts, “miss you” texts. The emptiness of his incoming call log. The cold air at his back every night he fell asleep in tears.

“Nothing.”

Finally, her grey eyes slipped to him. Noctis was in ruins. He couldn’t look her in the eye. His breaths clawed from inside his chest, shuddering painfully past his lips. His throat felt raw, his eyes were burning, and he didn’t know how to tell her that it was all his fault. That he’d created this nothing that haunted the both of them. He didn’t know how to tell her that he deserved all of her wrath. That he deserved a slap in the face, a curse, everything.

He’d killed her son. He’d killed the man he loved for being his father’s child. He’d destroyed the whole city by not being there to defend it. He’d buried Nyx in the rubble because he hadn’t been there to protect him.

He didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to be in the world where he hurt everything he’d loved.

But it wasn’t a fist to his face that she offered him. Instead, she rested a hand on his shoulder. Tender, soft, thumb moving in an unconscious circle that made him choke on a sob.

Because that’s how Nyx had touched him.

She pulled on a smile through her own soundless tears.

And she offered him a drink.


End file.
